194 fl The Secret Li@ of Nature
when one encounters say a plant or an animal or even a human being
one feels as if a part of oneself were actually within that other being. In
normal consciousness, and even in the first stage of clairvoyance, one
can still say: I am here and that being I see is there. In the second stage
one can only say: where that being is-whom I perceive-there am I."
Steiner describes the sensation as if one's etheric body were
stretching out tentacles on all sides with which to draw one to other
beings into whom one plunges with the actual sensation of immer-
sion. Thereafter, clairvoyants learn to plunge into everything con-
scious, into everything that can suffer and rejoice in a human way, into
everything alive, but not yet into what is without life or appears life-
less, which is seen as the mineral kingdom. "At this stage of clairvoy-
ance we only learn to live with plants, animals, and with other human
beings. We also learn to recognize behind all living things a higher
spiritual world-beings of the second hierarchy [exusiai, dynamis, and
kyriotetes, spirits of form, motion, and wisdom]. Yet at this second
stage, where we feel ourselves one with other beings, we realize that
we are still there, beside the other being."
To ascend to the highest stage of clairvoyance, to the world of
thrones, cherubim, and seraphim, sublime spirits of will, harmony, and
love, even this last remnant of egoistic experience must be abandoned.
"We must completely lose the feeling that we exist as a separate being.
We must feel the foreign being as ourself. We can then look at our-
selves as if seen from another being. We look out from within the for-
eign being and see ourselves as the foreign being. Only then, when this
third state is reached do we succeed in perceiving beings other than
those of the Second and Third hierarchies. We begin to see Thrones,
spirits of the First hierarchy, whose lowest substance is will."
On the mental plane, "vision," as described by Leadbeater, is totally
different. "One can no longer speak of separate senses such as sight and
hearing, but only of a general sense which responds fully to the vibra-
tions reaching it; so that when any object comes within its cognition it
at once comprehends it fully, sees, hears, feels and knows all there is to
know about it, in one instantaneous operation."